The American Civil Liberties Union released a report on Tuesday about the increasing militarization of the country’s police departments. The Massachusetts chapter has sued a Baystate SWAT team agency for refusing to release records for the report.

The national ACLU report, called ‘War Comes Home: The Excessive
Militarization of American Policing’, looked at the use of SWAT
teams in law enforcement, especially when it comes to drug raids.
Created in the late 1960s as “quasi-militaristic” units
designed to handle emergency situations such as riots, hostage
scenarios and active shooter situations, the number of SWAT
squads have since surged, and are “used with greater
frequency and, increasingly, for purposes for which they were not
originally intended—overwhelmingly to serve search warrants in
drug investigations,” according to the
report.

The report examined 818 SWAT operations from July 2010 to last
October, which were conducted by more than 20 law enforcement
agencies in 11 states.

The ACLU of Massachusetts (ACLUM) also released a report on the
agencies in the commonwealth.

“Unfortunately, it is very slim on SWAT raid details. One of
the reasons it is so slim on these details is because the cops,
when asked for after-action reports and statistics on raids,
claimed they didn't have them, that it would be too expensive to
compile them, or that they didn't have to obey public records
law,” The ACLUM’s PrivacySOS blog said.
“Record scratch. That can't be right.”

According to the ACLUM, the North Eastern Massachusetts Law
Enforcement Council (NEMLEC) – a group of 58 police and sheriff
departments in Middlesex and Essex counties – refused to release
records requested for the report, saying that it is a private,
non-profit corporation and therefore exempt from public records
laws.

In response, the civil rights organization filed a lawsuit
against NEMLEC Tuesday, saying that the law enforcement council
and its member agencies receive government grants and taxpayers’
money to purchase its equipment. In its suit, the Baystate
chapter is asking the Suffolk County Superior Court to declare
that NEMLEC's documents are public records and to order the
agency to release them.

"NEMLEC can't have it both ways," ACLUM staff attorney
Jessie Rossman said in a statement. "Either it is
a public entity subject to public records laws, or what it is
doing is illegal."

PrivacySOS detailed why the organization believes that NEMLEC
cannot be a private company.

“The law enforcement councils in our state are staffed by
public police officials, sustained by government grants, and
oversee law enforcement operations that involve busting down
people's doors and arresting them. And they want to claim these
entities are private, and therefore not subject to open records
law?”

The ACLU survey discovered that 62 percent of SWAT missions were
for drug searches. Some 79 percent involved raids on private
homes, and a similar proportion were carried out with warrants
authorizing searches. However, just seven percent of the
incidents fell into those categories for which SWAT was
originally designed to handle, such as hostage situations or
shootings.

As the United States winds down its military operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq, local police forces are getting the used
‘hand-me-downs’ from the US military. This makes some American
communities resemble the latest occupied zones with police
dressed in combat fatigues and driving MRAPs and carrying AR-15s
down Main Street. And that militarization is exactly what makes
NEMLAC different than the non-profit it claims to be, ACLUM
believes.

"Private individuals can't own automatic weapons, or even get
product information about armored vehicles," Rossman said.
"NEMLEC operates with all of the privileges of a law
enforcement agency, and like a law enforcement agency, it should
be accountable to the public."

Along with the lawsuit, ACLUM made several recommendations to the
Massachusetts legislature in its report, released on the
PrivacySOS blog. The group asked Baystate legislators to enact
laws requiring transparency and oversight of the use of SWAT
teams in the commonwealth.

The suggestions included agencies using standardized forms about
SWAT deployments and using those forms to generate quarterly
reports; reporting to the legislature on a quarterly basis the
number of times SWAT teams were deployed, the details of each
deployment and the reasons necessitating the use of a SWAT team;
and creating an agency to oversee and monitor SWAT activity
throughout Massachusetts. That agency would also be in charge of
implementing reforms and developing a process for addressing
civilian complaints against SWAT tactics.